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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics

Friday, October 28, 2016

A
study by Canadian astronomers has attracted considerable attention,
because the astronomers claim that they may have found evidence of
extraterrestrial civilizations.The
astronomers used spectra, which is what results when you pass the
light from a star through a scientific instrument such as a
spectrograph, which splits up the light into component parts. The
astronomers say they have picked up irregularities in the spectra of
234 stars.

A cluster of stars (credit: NASA)

Viewed
without any transformation or alteration, the “signals” in
question look completely natural. But the astronomers monkeyed with
the data to get it to cough up some blips.

The
paper gives figures such as the one below, showing something received
from one particular star.

But
this data is not raw data from the star. It is data that has been
transformed by the astronomers, who keep telling us in their paper
that they are showing a “Fourier modulus of the frequency spectrum
(after subtraction of its smoothed spectrum).” That's some kind of
abstruse mathematical contortion – something many times more
complicated than an average. Why should we be impressed by some kind
of blip that emerges only after some statistical or mathematical
tinkering has been done? There are 101 ways to massage data to get it
to produce some type of blip, if you are looking for some type of
blip to appear.

Press
reports claim that these “signals” match exactly signals
predicted in a 2012 paper. But that isn't actually true. The 2012
paper shows a type of blip that might appear in a stellar spectrum,
but it shows a great big blip. The type of blips shown in the new
paper by the Canadians are only small blips.

Here
is the graph shown in the 2012 paper, which is just a "we might get signals like this some day" type of graph:

The graph above shows a blip much, much more dramatic than the type of blips shown in the paper of the Canadian astronomers.

I
find it rather hard to believe the idea that extraterrestrials would
artificially modify the radiation coming from their stars (presumably
a very expensive business) in the hopes that such signals would be
detected by people on other planets who just happened to apply a
Fourier transform (plus an additional subtraction) to such signals.
Such a message would be merely a “we are here” type of message
that would not transmit semantic content, such as you can transmit in
a radio message. But if you are going to go to all the trouble of
trying to communicate with planets outside of you, why not use radio
signals, which allow you to send detailed, meaningful content (such
as a description of what your planet is like, and what type of beings
live on it)?

Then
there is the coincidence problem. Since the stars in question are
scattered throughout space, if we are to believe that most of the
spectra blips were produced by extraterrestrials, we would have to
believe that coincidentally more than 100 extraterrestrial
civilizations decided to use the same weird technique for signaling
their existence, a technique that is not one of the five main
techniques we would think extraterrestrials would use. Such a
coincidence seems far-fetched.

I
am also troubled by the fact that the signal is not directly found in
the data, but only emerges after some monkeying with the signal that
is not straightforward. We can imagine a UFO investigator presenting
similar evidence:

UFO
Investigator: No, the UFO only showed up after I applied multiple
transformations to the photo. First, I applied a “Fish eye”
transformation. Then I performed a “horizontal shift”
transformation. Only then did the disk-shaped UFO show up.

What
is very strange is that astronomers seem to be ignoring evidence of
unexplained sky anomalies and UFO's in our own skies, but then they
try to go torturing data from other stars until it drips out signs of
extraterrestrials. There are very many unaltered photos and videos
of unexplained phenomena in our own skies. Such photos and videos do
not use exotic transformation techniques to produce evidence of
something unusual. There is also abundant eyewitness testimony, and
the witnesses were not wearing “special light transformation”
glasses when they saw what they saw. Why should not such things be
regarded as something much more substantial than evidence that only
emerges when you have massaged data until it produces the effect you
are looking for?

Why
might a scientist ignore a great deal of photographs, videos, and
eyewitness sightings, all suggesting evidence of something
unexplained or extraterrestrial in our skies, but instead prefer to
focus on some minor blips from distant stars that only emerge after
some contrived methodology in which raw data is massaged until it
looks very different? Perhaps the explanation has something to do
with snobbery. All those UFO photos and videos are taken by
ordinary citizens. There seems to be an unfortunate tendency among
the very clannish scientific community for scientists to think along
the lines of, “An observation doesn't count unless it was produced
by someone in our little country club.” This type of snooty
elitism makes no sense.

Besides
a kind of people snobbery, I think there's also a kind of
technological snobbery going on. A scientist may prefer some mildly
suggestive observation produced by some fancy expensive piece of
scientific equipment, rather than accept a much more substantial
observation made by someone using some $80 point-and-click camera.
This also makes no sense, since the reliability of an observation has
no relation to how complicated or expensive was the equipment used to
produce it. In fact, the fancier the equipment, the greater the
opportunities for error.

Monday, October 24, 2016

Our
scientists are often giving us visual displays designed to impress us
with their grasp of nature. Such visuals should sometimes be taken with a large
grain of salt, as they are often examples of dubious dogma. An
example is the type of “composition of the universe” pie graph
that shows the universe as about 71% dark energy, 24% dark matter and
5% regular matter. But as I discussed in my previous post “A
Second Bullet in the Chest of Dark Matter?” the case for dark
matter is wobbly, and two recent findings are hard to reconcile with
standard accounts of dark matter. Commenting on one of these
findings, an astrophysicist has said, “Nothing in the
standard cosmological model predicts this and it is almost impossible
to imagine how that model could be modified to explain it, without
discarding the dark matter hypothesis completely.”

In
my previous post I suggested that we should replace the dogmatic
“composition of the universe” pie chart with a table listing the
universe's contents as ? % dark matter, ? % dark energy, ? % atoms,
and ? % unknown. Coincidentally, a few days after making this post,
there appeared a news science story that seems to further shatter all
confidence that we understand the composition of the universe.

The
new science story dealt not with dark matter but dark energy. No one
has any idea what dark energy is, but there is a vague idea that the
vacuum of space may be filled with dark energy. The case for dark
energy seemed to solidify when scientists announced that the
expansion of the universe is accelerating. Scientists said that only
dark energy in the vacuum of space could account for this
acceleration. We were told that dark energy has a kind of expansive
pressure, rather like the gas pressure that keeps a helium balloon
from collapsing, and that this is causing the universe's expansion to
accelerate.

But
now dark energy may have taken its own bullet in the chest. It comes
from this paper dealing with supernova explosions. The conclusion
that the universe's expansion is accelerating was based largely on an
analysis of the star explosions called supernova explosions. The new
paper also analyzes supernova explosions, but uses a more
sophisticated technique and a larger database. The new paper says,
“We find, rather surprisingly, that the data are still quite
consistent with a constant rate of expansion.”

As
discussed here, the new paper casts doubt on the claim that the
expansion of the universe is accelerating. In doing so, it seems to
undermine the main evidence for dark energy.

Ouch!
It looks like our swaggering, strutting cosmologists may have little
idea about what they are talking about when they pontificate about
the composition of the universe. But we shouldn't be surprised by
such dogmatic overconfidence, seeing how extremely common it is in
the fields of physics, biology and neuroscience. Should we tear out
those pages of the astronomy textbooks that have dogmatic
“composition of the universe” pie charts? Perhaps instead we can
print up some candid stickers resembling the visual below, and paste
them over such “composition of the universe” pie charts. The
figure in the white coat represents a scientist with the proper
degree of intellectual humility.

Postscript: Some news reports said that the authors of the new paper on supernova explosions had said that the expansion of the universe is not accelerating. But their paper was actually entitled "Marginal evidence for cosmic acceleration from Type Ia supernovae." They merely claimed that the evidence for an accelerating universe was marginal. Their paper is rebutted by this paper from today, entitled "Is the expansion of the universe accelerating? All signs point to yes."

Thursday, October 20, 2016

The
phrase “caught with your pants down” means to be found in an
embarrassing situation. This is exactly what has happened to the
swaggering overconfident theorists who have been telling us for
decades that many a cosmic mystery can be explained by postulating
the existence of dark matter.

For
decades such theorists have said the behavior of galaxies cannot be
explained merely by the gravitational attraction of ordinary visible
matter. So, we have been told, there must be some kind of additional
matter, an invisible matter, what is called dark matter. No one has
ever produced direct observational evidence for such dark matter, and
the Standard Model of physics does not include dark matter. But our
dark matter theorists have insisted that there is indirect evidence
for dark matter, and have even dogmatically asserted that the
universe is 26.8% dark matter. This type of unwarranted precision
about an unknown has struck many as being an absurd case of
theoretical overconfidence.

Now a new study has cast grave doubt on
whether dark matter even exists. (Interestingly, a recent article in
Astronomy magazine states, “Scientists now know that dark
matter comprises some 84 percent of the universe’s material,”
which is so far off from the other estimate it makes you wonder
whether someone's just picking numbers out of a hat.)

As reported here and here, the
new study found that the rotation speed of galaxies correlates very
strongly with the amount of visible matter in galaxies. In other
words, if you know how much visible matter is in a galaxy, you can
accurately predict the rotation speed of that galaxy. Such a
relation is all but impossible to explain under dark matter theories.
As astrophysicist David Merrit says, “Nothing in the
standard cosmological model predicts this and it is almost impossible
to imagine how that model could be modified to explain it, without
discarding the dark matter hypothesis completely.”

The
new study seems like a bullet in the chest of dark matter theory. And
it may be the second bullet in the chest of dark matter theory. In
August scientists announced findings about a distant galaxy called
Dragonfly 44. This galaxy seems to have about roughly the mass
of our galaxy, but only emits 1 percent of the light our galaxy
emits. So astronomers stated that this Dragonfly 44 galaxy seems to
be 99.99% dark matter. But such a conclusion raises the question: how
could some galaxy get to be 99.99% dark matter, if dark matter is
only about five times more common than regular matter? Our
cosmologists have been telling us that dark matter is about five
times more common than regular matter, and that the two are mixed
throughout the universe. If two things are mixed together in a five
to one ratio, we should not expect that you would have some local
concentration that contained 99.99% of the first thing. A galaxy
that is 99.99% dark matter seems no more likely than there might form
over a town a lethal patch of the atmosphere that is 99.99% nitrogen
and only .01% oxygen, something that would cause you to die of oxygen
starvation.

Our
scientists talk dogmatically about dark matter, and present arguments
for its existence. But such arguments typically involve some
underlying assumptions such as the following:

The
only force acting to determine the structure of galaxies is
gravitation.

Gravitation
acts in the simple way that matches our formulas for gravitation,
rather than in some more complicated way.

Since
such assumptions are dubious, the case for dark matter is very
doubtful. What we observe is a universe behaving in strange,
mysterious ways. Our scientists try to make things look less
mysterious by making precise estimates of the composition of the
universe. It would be much more honest if such scientists admitted
that we do not understand such things.

From
a philosophical perspective, it is entirely possible that the
universe is zero percent matter. All that we have direct knowledge
of is what goes on in our own minds. Philosophers such as George
Berkeley have presented reasonable scenarios of a “mind only”
universe in which matter exists only as something perceived within a
mind.

Let
us imagine a savage living on some remote island in the Pacific
ocean. The savage knows nothing of modern science and technology, and
he often finds his little world to be a frightening place,
particularly when there are thunderstorms. Yet the savage has one
consoling thought: he thinks that the local witch doctor knows almost
everything. But one day something surprising happens: the savage sees
a distant jet airplane passing by the island, something he has never
seen before. Bewildered, the savage goes to the witch doctor, and
asks him to explain this wonder. “Oh that,” says the witch
doctor. “That was just a big insect.” Now the savage is relieved.
He can still believe that the witch doctor is a lord of
understanding.

No
doubt our cosmologists will try to explain away this latest cosmology
anomaly in some similar way. Once society has anointed a figure as a
great “lord of understanding,” such a figure will almost never
say, “You know, I really don't understand these matters.”

But
if our cosmologists were to be candid, they would cross out their
dogmatic “composition of the universe” pie charts, and replace
them with a frank diagram looking like the lower chart below.

Postscript: A new scientific paper notes that "no explanation exists so far for the observed dearth of dwarf galaxies in the local universe compared to the large number of dark matter halos predicted by" dark matter theory.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Oxford University Press
has recently published a book entitled Near Death Experiences:
Understanding Visions of the Afterlife by
the philosophers John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin.
University presses typically publish books by people who are experts
in what they are writing about. But being a philosopher is no
qualification at all for writing a book on near-death experiences.
Being a neurologist, a psychologist or a parapsychologist might be a
relevant credential, but we should not expect a philosopher would be
more qualified to write about near-death experiences than, say, a
plumber or a baseball pitcher.

Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin certainly have not made up for their lack of
relevant credentials by being diligent in doing original research on
their topic. They seemed to have done no original research
whatsoever, and seem to show no evidence of having personally talked to
anyone who had a near-death experience. They also seem to show no evidence
of having personally interviewed any of the doctors or scientists who
are researching near-death experiences. Where's the legwork? Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin have taken a lazy armchair approach which fails
to offer any substantive new contribution to this topic. They haven't
even done any numerical or classification work such as numerically
categorizing or classifying near-death experiences.

Armchair indolence

Their
discussion of near-death experiences has curious omissions. In recent
years probably the biggest event in the field of near-death
experiences was the 2014 AWARE study published in a scientific
journal, a paper authored by Sam Parnia and co-authored by many other
doctors and scientists. The study receives no mention in Fischer and
Mitchell-Yellin's book.

They
do discuss the well-known Pam Reynolds case of a woman who reported
verified details of her operation while she was unconscious and allegedly having an out-of-body experience. Reynolds
had both her eyes and her ears blocked (the latter being blocked by
an earphone emitting 100-decibel clicks). To try to explain this,
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin offer an explanation (on page 23) that is not
credible: “Rather, we are raising the possibility that, even though
she was unconscious, auditory impressions may still have registered,
and they could have come to be conscious awareness later.” That's
absurd. A sound is not something that sits in your brain like an
unread e-mail message to be read at your leisure. If a sound isn't
part of your conscious experience, the sound will not be remembered
later. I may note that in this case Reynolds had earphones that were
blocking her hearing and sending in 100-decibel clicks, so in this
case a “delayed perception of received sounds” theory is
particularly lame.

We can
imagine someone suggesting something similar: “While I was out cold
from all those sleeping pills, and while I had my headphones on, that
were sending me loud white noise, I heard you insult me, and when I
woke up I remembered hearing that when I was in deep sleep.” That's hardly a
claim you'd believe.

To try
to support this untenable theory, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin
imagine a case of someone who drives home passing by a traffic
accident, pays no attention to it, comes home, and then sees a report
of it on the TV, leading him to recall seeing the accident. But
that's a case of paying little attention to a perception you are
consciously experiencing, which does nothing to make credible Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin's preposterous idea that your brain can store
memories of something you heard while you were unconscious.

Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin do not champion any one natural explanation to
account for near-death experiences, relying on a pastiche of sketchy
ideas, suggestions and suspicions. One of the main things they rely
on is an utterly dubious appeal to an unbelievable psychological
theory called terror management theory. On page 68-69 of their book,
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin suggest that “terror management theory
can explain why people who have near-death experiences would
experience reunions specifically with their loved ones.”

Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin attempt to pass off this extremely dubious
“terror management theory” as some kind of established science,
claiming that it is “well-validated” and that “over the past
three decades, its predictions about human behavior have been
repeatedly verified.” They offer no evidence or reference to back
up this claim, which is off the mark. A 2009 paper entitled “Mortality
Salience: Testing the Predictions of Terror Management Theory”
discussed four studies that all failed to verify the predictions of
terror management theory. The paper here notes a case where terror
management theory (TMT) makes the wrong prediction:

TMT researchers assert
that disgust reactions to death are part of such defenses, generating
the prediction that death disgust should increase with age. Here,
using the measure of disgust sensitivity devised by the Rozin School,
we have shown that, contrary to this prediction, disgust sensitivity
in the death domain declines with age.

On
page 141 of their book, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin are trying to
explain a near-death experience in which a child named Colton
reported floating out of his body, and then observing his father
praying in one room and his mother praying in another room (an
account confirmed by his father). Again Fischer and
Mitchell-Yellin appeal to terror management theory. They say:

For the second step, we
might appeal to terror management theory. It is plausible that a
visual representation of his parents praying would help to relieve
some of Colton Burpo's anxiety about his severe illness and surgery.

This
is weak logic, since it does nothing to explain the accuracy of the
reported observation or vision, nor is it clear why anyone would
hallucinate about their parents praying as an anxiety-reducing
mechanism (since your parents would be most likely to simultaneously pray
for you if you were on the brink of death). A sight of your parents
praying for your survival is no more anxiety-reducing than the sight
of a priest giving you last rites.

Like
Freud's simplistic theory which attempted to explain most human
psychological problems as being caused by a single cause (childhood traumas), terror management theory is a simplistic
psychological theory that claims that the fear of death is the
motivating cause behind very much or most human behavior. But the
idea that human behavior is mostly motivated by anxiety about death
is completely inconsistent with a large variety of observed human
behaviors that are very risky, such as suicides, unsafe sex, bungee
jumping, jaywalking, cliff-diving, cigarette smoking, eating
unhealthy foods, and people who drive fast and drive without seat
belts. So these types of human behaviors are strong evidence against
terror management theory, which is not something “well validated”
as Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin claim.

Although terror
management theory's proponents claim that it is an evolutionary theory of human
behavior, its major tenets are implausible when examined carefully
from a modern evolutionary
perspective. We explain why it is unlikely that natural selection
would have designed a
“survival instinct” or innate “fear of death,” nor an
anxiety-reduction system in general, or
worldview-defense system in particular, to ameliorate such fears.

The
point is a solid one. Natural selection is “interested” only in
your survival until you are finished reproducing, and has no interest
whatsoever in whether you might have pleasant hallucinations when you
die. I may note that terror management theory is an attempt to
explain common human behaviors and beliefs, and does not at all
predict that you will have pleasant visions when you die. Fischer
and Mitchell-Yellin have hijacked terror management theory, using it
for some purpose that it was not intended. It's rather like some
person claiming that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (part of
quantum mechanics) helps explain why his girlfriend is uncertain
about spending the night with him.

There
is, in fact, no evidence that humans not close to dying have
anxiety-reducing hallucinations when they are faced with anxiety or
are in fear of death. No one who is approached by a threatening
gunman ever has a hallucination that the gunman is bearing a bouquet
of flowers, and no one who is on a sinking ship ever has a hallucination
that a ship has come to save him. Moreover, people have near-death
experiences when their heart has stopped or they are unconscious, so
any psychological theory to explain a near-death experience vision is
futile. Psychology is not going on when you are unconscious. Your
brain does not do “fear management” when you are unconscious,
because there is no fear at such a time.

I can
think of ways in which a philosopher could use his philosophical
training to add to the debate about near-death experiences –
perhaps by offering some insight from the branch of philosophy called
the philosophy of mind, or perhaps by speculating about some metaphysical
reality that might explain such experiences. But we don't seem to get
any such thing from Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, who just lazily
give us garden-variety armchair skepticism without any original
research.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Nowadays when people
discuss the concept of a simulated universe, they generally discuss
the argument presented by Nick Bostrom. Bostrom's argument has got
an amazing amount of attention, considering the fact that it is very
weak. Bostrom reasoned that there may be super-advanced
extraterrestrial civilizations that could build super-sophisticated
gigantic computers, perhaps as large as planets. He claimed that such
computers would be capable of simulating all of human experience. He
argued that if a super-civilization was interested in simulating
human experiences, it might run a gigantic number of “ancestor
simulations” simulating the experience of creatures such as us.
There might be so many such computer-generated “ancestor
simulations” that it might be more likely that we are living in
such a simulation than that we are regular beings living in a regular
material reality.

There are several reasons
why this argument is not very convincing. One is that it relies on a
reductionist theory of the human mind, the idea that the human mind is
just some by-product of material effects. There are very good
reasons for believing that such a theory is wrong, and that something
like human consciousness could never be produced by any computer.
Among such reasons are psychic experiences suggesting that there is a
lot more to human consciousness than brain activity, and also the
fact that some humans have had pretty normal human consciousness even
though very much or most of their brain was lost to disease (as documented by the
physician John Lorber). Another reason (discussed here) is that
while super-advanced civilizations might try their hands at running
ancestor simulations, we have no reason to think that they would keep
running such simulations for thousands of years (particularly since
such super-advanced civilizations would have a trillion other
fascinating projects they might busy themselves with). The chance of
being part of some “ancestor simulation” that might be run during
only a thousandth of the history of a very old super-advanced
civilization seems very low. Then there is the fact that if we try
to argue from a likelihood of extraterrestrial civilizations to a
likelihood of a simulated universe, then once we reach the idea of a
simulated universe we reach an “all bets are off” stage, in which
we no longer have a basis for believing in the likelihood of
extraterrestrial civilizations (since such a likelihood involves
assuming the physical reality of external planets, something you can
no longer count on if the universe is simulated). It is not
logically valid to start with a premise and then use that premise to
reach a conclusion that undermines the very premise you started off
with.

So Bostrom's argument
about a simulated universe is weak. But is there a stronger case we
can make for such a concept? There may be. Below is a general
argument for a universe that is simulated in the sense of not having
the age and material reality that we normally suppose. Although the
argument mentions a simulated universe, it is not explicitly
referring to a universe that is a computer simulation.

Here is a short version of
the argument:

If the universe is in
some sense simulated, we would expect that it would have various
artificiality indications, which might include things such as
indications of inexplicable sudden beginnings, internal
self-contradictions, or regularities that are incredibly unlikely to
exist by chance.

Our universe seems to
have quite a few such artificiality indications.

So there is a good
chance our universe is in some sense a simulation – perhaps
something that exists as a matrix or substrate for conscious
experience rather than something that exists as a
physical reality independent of consciousness.

To explain the concept of
an artificiality indication, let me discuss my favorite episode of
the classic TV series The Twilight Zone. The episode is called
“Stopover in a Quiet Town,” and begins as a man and a woman find
themselves waking up in a deserted town. Their memories are
scattered, because they were drinking too much the previous night.
The couple doesn't know how they got in this town. Searching around
in the town, the couple finds strange things – for example, a
refrigerator has only plastic food, and there is a stuffed squirrel
in a fake tree. Finally the couple notices a giant body above them.
We see a giant girl pick up the couple in their hands. We then hear
the girl's mother say the wonderful line, “Be careful with your
pets, dear – your father brought them all the way from Earth.”
Evidently the couple has been abducted by extraterrestrials, and put
in a simulated human environment. The plastic food and the stuffed
squirrel were artificiality indications – clues that their
environment was an artificial construction.

The question is: do we
have any such artificial indications in our own universe? Perhaps we
do.

One type of artificiality
indication you can imagine is an inexplicable sudden beginning.
For example, in the “Stopover in a Quiet Town” scenario, the
couple might have woken up with a dark sky outside, and then suddenly
it might have been light (as the giant girl turned on the lights
above them). Are there any inexplicable sudden beginnings that we
know of in our universe? Quite a few, apparently. You can start with
the Big Bang, the mother-of-all inexplicable sudden beginnings. Then
there's the almost equally inexplicable origin of life believed to
have occurred billions of years ago. Then there's the quite sudden
Cambrian Explosion, in which a large fraction of the animal phyla appear suddenly
in the fossil record about 550 million years ago. Then there's the
apparently rather sudden origin of modern consciousness about 90,000
years ago.

We actually see little
evidence of transitional fossils in the fossil record. It's almost as
if someone had made a rather half-hearted attempt to simulate a
natural past history of life on our planet, without doing all the
work needed to leave behind a fully believable story in the fossil
record. This may be a little like the fake food in the refrigerator
in “Stopover in a Quiet Town.”

Another type of
artificiality indication is an inconsistency. For example, suppose the
couple in “Stopover in a Quiet Town” had found that the post
office sign said “Pleasantville Post Office,” but the sign at the
town's front said, “Welcome to Sunnyville.” This inconsistency
would be a clue that the town was an artificial simulation.

Can we find such
inconsistencies in our universe? Perhaps we can. Quantum field theory
predicts that the vacuum should be incredibly dense, far denser than
steel. But we see in outer space a vacuum that is almost empty.
Quantum mechanics is actually inconsistent with general relativity,
but both make predictions that have been very well verified. Are
such inconsistencies signs of a universe that is artificial or
simulated?

Conversely, when things
are too consistent and unvarying, that can be an artificiality
indication. So suppose that our “Stopover in a Quiet Town” couple
had started to examine the rocks in the small town they woke up in,
and found that all of the rocks were of two sizes: pebbles exactly
one inch in length, and larger rocks exactly five inches in length.
And suppose that all of the pebbles looked exactly the same, and all
of the larger rocks looked exactly the same. That would be a strong
artificiality indication. Is there anything like that in our
universe?

Perhaps there is. When we
get to the subatomic level, we find that all protons have exactly the
same mass and charge, that all neutrons have exactly the same mass
and no charge, and that all electrons have exactly the same mass and
charge. Is this an artificiality indication?

It could be that these
things I have mentioned are artificiality indications, clues that our
universe is something like an artificial or simulated universe. The
fact that the universe seems to be 13 billion years old is no proof
that it is. It could be that things such as the cosmic background
radiation and dinosaur fossils are just part of a kind of “backstory”
plugged into our universe to “flesh out the simulation.”

Going back to the
“Stopover in a Quiet Town” scenario, imagine the perplexed couple
wandering around the town comes across a plaque in the town that
looks like this:

Would this sign prove that
the town was actually founded in 1745, burnt in the War of 1812, and
visited by Abraham Lincoln? No, in this scenario the sign is just a
bit of “backstory” provided to flesh out the simulation.
Similarly, some things that our scientists take so seriously such as
the cosmic background radiation or dinosaur fossils may be just
things thrown into an artificial universe to “flesh out the
simulation” by providing some “backstory” suggesting a past of
a certain type.

If our universe is in some
sense artificial or simulated, then we cannot tell how old it is,
cannot tell how much matter it has, and cannot even tell whether it
even has matter. The universe could mainly just be a substrate or
kind of arena for the experiences of creatures such as us, and may
have no reality outside of our minds.

Our scientists have such
faith in their calculations of the universe's age, but this may be
unwarranted overconfidence. Let's imagine an interesting scenario.
Let's imagine that in the year 2500 some power (extraterrestrial or
supernatural) creates an artificial zoo-like environment for humans
(enclosed by a ring of high cliffs), and that such a power then
creates some adult humans and puts them in this environment. We
might imagine that the humans, the trees, and the grass were created
either through some miracle or through some fancy genetic technology.

We can then imagine that
these newly created humans might try to calculate how old their
environment is. They might take some seeds from a high tree, plant
the seeds, watch how fast the newly planted tree grows, and do a
projection, which might lead them to believe their environment is at
least 100 years old (based on the high trees they observe). They
might also bear a child, and project from the child's growth rate
that they must be at least 20 years old. The humans might then
confidently proclaim (in the year 2503) that they had scientifically
double-proven that they must be living in an environment at least 20
years old. But this would not be accurate, since their environment
would actually have been created only 3 years ago, in 2500. The point
of this thought experiment is: age calculations cannot be reliably
done in an environment that is artificial or simulated. The
possibility of an artificial or simulated universe means we cannot
really be very confident that our universe has been around for 13
billion years. We can merely say that we have a method of calculating
the universe's age that suggests such a conclusion.

People nowadays often ask,
“Is the universe a computer simulation?” But that is too narrow a
question to be asking. A computer-simulated universe is only one type
of artificial universe, and there are many other types of artificial
universes we can imagine. The broader question we should be asking
is: is our universe something artificial that reflects the purpose of
some higher intelligence?

Saturday, October 8, 2016

Below is a
list giving only a fraction of the very many things that modern
science is unable to explain. Some of these things are exotic and
anomalous phenomena, and others are very ordinary and familiar
things.

Below is a
brief commentary on some of the items in the list, proceeding from
top to bottom, and left to right.

Line 1:
The Big Bang is the origin of the universe, which is completely
unexplained, because we have no idea of what caused it. Baryon
asymmetry is the unexplained fact that the Big Bang should have
produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but we don't observe
any such balance in our universe – matter is actually many times
more common than antimatter. The genetic code is a system of
symbolic representations that seems to have been used by life from
the very beginning. Explaining how such a system could have naturally
appeared seems very hard or impossible.

Line 2:
ESP or extra-sensory perception has been well demonstrated in
laboratory experiments such as those done by professor Joseph Rhine, but the existence
of such a phenomenon seems impossible to explain under materialistic
assumptions. The origin of life is a problem scientists have been
knocking their heads over for ages, but they have done very little to
explain it (and it certainly cannot be explained through natural
selection, which requires that life first exists). Near-death
experiences have not been explained through theories of
hallucinations, which are unable to account for why such experiences
so often have a similar pattern.

Line 3:
Apparitions are the same as ghost sightings, a phenomena that has
occurred throughout history, but which is unexplained. Quantum
entanglement has not been well-explained because it involves “spooky
action at a distance” that scientists repeatedly said was
impossible until quantum entanglement was proven. The alignment of
quasar polarization vectors is a strange mystery discussed here.

Line 4:
Consciousness is still an unsolved mystery, and involves the
strange riddle as to how some arrangement of matter could possibly
give rise to a totally different type of thing, the thing we call
Mind (getting Mind from matter seems rather like squeezing a rock to
produce blood). Dreaming is hard-to-explain as it seems to serve no
purpose (and sometimes involves retrieval of distant memories one
would think would be impossible while a person is sleeping). The
vacuum's low density is the cosmological constant problem, the
problem that the space between stars is almost entirely empty of
mass-energy, even though quantum field theory predicts it should be very
densely packed with mass-energy (see here for more about this).

Line 5:
UFO's are unexplained lights or objects in the sky, sometimes
extremely bright and large, which are not adequately explained by
ideas such as mistaken identifications of aircraft and the planet
Venus. Remote viewing is a psychic ability that the US government
spent millions of dollars investigating, often producing astonishing
results, but with no explanation of the cause. Charge conservation
is the unexplained fact that when there are high-speed collisions of
matter (such as in particle accelerators or shortly after the Big
Bang), nature “balances the books” so that the number of negative
charges balances the number of positive charges. Our existence
depends on this convenient law of nature.

Line 6:
The Cambrian Explosion is the fact that we see very few
fossils in the fossil record until a time about 550 million years
ago, when all of a sudden there appears most of the major phyla of
animals. This sudden appearance is unexplained because it seems to
defy expectations of gradual evolution. The existence of long-term
memories lasting 50 years or more is unexplained, because prevailing
theories of memory are based on synapse storage of memory, but (as
discussed here) synapses are subject to rapid molecular turnover
which should make them unsuitable for storing memories for more than
a few weeks. The fine-tuning of the Higgs field (also called the
“naturalness problem” by physicists) is something that physicists have tried for decades to solve, thus far having no success. It involves a crucial factor in nature that seems to have a favorable and fantastically improbable value.

Line 7:
Instantaneous memory retrieval is unexplained for the reasons
discussed here. We have no explanation of how the brain could be
retrieving a memory stored in some particular location of the brain,
for it seems that the brain could never know where such a location
would be. Schizophrenia is still unexplained, as are almost all
mental illnesses (we know that drugs can help the symptoms of
schizophrenia, but we don't understand why such drugs work). Genetic
explanations don't work to explain schizophrenia, for it seems that
if there were some gene defect causing schizophrenia, natural
selection would have such caused such a defect to disappear from the
gene pool. Atomic quantization restricts electron energy levels to
certain discrete values. It's another natural law necessary for our
existence, but unexplained.

Line 8:
Crop circles are
mysterious arrangements (often 100 meters or larger) in crops that
appear overnight. There is no scientific explanation for this
phenomenon, and skeptics have to resort to implausible theories of
super-industrious fakers.
Stevenson was a researcher who found very many cases of children who
claimed to have had past lives. He was often able to corroborate the
details they provided in such accounts. Savants are cases like that
of Kim Peek, who was able to perform astonishing mental feats such as
remembering the entire contents of 7000 books he had read. Very
strangely, savants often have great problems in other areas of mental
functioning.

Line 9:
Spiral galaxy spin-nonrandomness is explained here. The double-slit
experiment is perhaps the most baffling experiment in physics, under
which particles behave like either particles or waves, seemingly in a
way that almost suggests they can tell how they are being observed.
John Lorber was a doctor who documented cases of almost-normal brain
functioning in patients who had lost most of their brains due to
diseases such as hydroencephalus. More than half of the patients he
studied had above average intelligence.

Line 10:
The problem of the Big Bang's improbable smoothness is discussed
here, where I discuss a scientific paper saying that “the
total fraction of the trajectories that are smooth at early times”
is very roughly 1 in 10 to
the 66 millionth power.
The existence of man's higher mental capabilities is an unsolved
mystery because (as discussed here) so many of these capabilities
(such as musical ability, spirituality, philosophical reasoning, and
math ability) are things we cannot explain as being products of
natural selection (as they are things that do not increase an
organism's likelihood of surviving in the wild). Daryl Bem's precognition
experiments are those suggesting a small but real anomalous ability of humans
to foretell the near future, something inexplicable.

Line 11:
The placebo effect is the effect by which something with no medical
effectiveness will produce good medical results, apparently just
because someone thinks it is effective or may be effective. The
evolution of extremely complicated proteins (particularly those with very
rugged “fitness landscapes” and those with a high sensitivity to
changes) is unexplained by natural selection, as are the appearance
of very complicated biological systems of a type which require great
complexity and coordination before yielding any survival value. The
tether incident on the STS-75 space shuttle mission was one in which
a swarm of baffling objects appeared, behaving like some kind of
strange creatures or UFO's.

Line 12:
The origin of language is a problem scientists have failed to offer
much insight on, as discussed here. How is it that all those brain changes and larynx changes needed for
speaking and understanding language could have occurred, when so much
coordinated functionality would have to happen before any survival
benefit would be produced? And how is it that a language could ever
get started, when you would seem to need a language to ever establish
a language?
Verified premonitions are what happens when someone has a specific
fear of some future misfortune, one that matches an actual disaster
that occurred. In his book The
Science of Premonitions,
Larry Dossey provided many examples. “The law of the five allowed
stable particles” is a name I use for the fact that nature behaves
in such a way so that when high-energy particle collisions occur, the stable end product is never anything other than a
proton, a neutron, an electron, a photon, or a neutrino. Scientists
have no explanation for why nature behaves in such a restricted way
(something necessary for our existence).

Line
13:
Fermi bubbles are gigantic bubbles of energy, one stretching above
our galaxy, and another stretching below it. An article produced by
the National Accelerator Laboratory is entitled, “Despite Extensive
Analysis, Fermi Bubbles Defy Explanation,” and notes, “The
farthest reaches of the Fermi bubbles boast some of the highest
energy gamma rays, but there's no discernible cause for them that far
from the galaxy.” Fermi's Paradox is the fact that we have
discovered no firm proof of extraterrestrials, despite living in a
galaxy that offers billions of solar systems in which life has the
opportunity to arise. “Peak in Darien” experiences are a
particularly inexplicable type of near-death experience in which a
subject who nearly died reports seeing a vision of dead people,
including someone who died but whose death was unknown to the subject
when he had such a vision.

Line
14:
Why there is something rather than nothing is an age-old
philosophical question that science does not explain. Why didn't we
just have the perfect simplicity of eternal nothingness, something
that would seem easier to explain than a universe with some
particular set of characteristics? The fine-tuning of nuclear physics
is the fact that the fundamental constants of nature have to be just
right in order for you to end up with sufficient quantities of oxygen
and carbon, and also stable molecules. Imagining a multiverse is not a scientific explanation of such a thing, both because imagining
unobserved universes does not qualify as science, and also you don't
explain the features of this particular universe (as opposed to “some
universe”) by imagining a multiverse. The origin and persistence
of spiral galaxies is a mystery because the rotations of spiral
galaxies should cause their spiral arms to “unwind,” which means
these beautiful spiral structures should not last more than a few
hundred million years. See here for more on this.

Line
15:
The widespread existence of homosexuality (with about 5% of the human
population being homosexual) is not explained by science,
particularly since we would think that natural selection would have
caused such a tendency to disappear from the human population. The
faint young sun paradox is the fact that models of stellar evolution
suggest that the sun should have given off much less energy billions
of years ago, presumably resulting in an Earth too cold for life to
have appeared at the time scientists say life appeared. The exact
matching of the proton charge and the electron charge (which have an
absolute value that is identical, to 18 decimal places) is a
“coincidence” on which our existence depends, as it is necessary
for planets to hold together. Modern physics offers no explanation
for this exact match, which seems very surprising given that each
proton has a mass 1836 times greater than each electron.

Line
16:
Believed to make up most of the universe, dark energy and dark matter
are both unexplained by scientists, who have no idea what particles
are involved in these things (the Standard Model of Physics does not
include either dark matter or dark energy). Morphogenesis is one of
the biggest unsolved mysteries of biology. It is the mystery of how
it is that a tiny fertilized ovum (the size of a grain of sand) is
able to progress to become a full baby before birth. The DNA inside
our cells seems to have no such thing as sequential instructions that
might explain such a progression. The “global consciousness
effect” is an effect by which the expected results from a global
network of random number generators shows mysterious deviations
during important world events.

Line
17: Orbs are mysterious circular anomalies that appear in photos.
Although skeptics claim they are dust, many orb photos (such as these) show orbs that
are too big to be dust, too bright to be dust, too colorful to be
dust, and too fast-moving to be dust (as well as orbs that have
stripes, distinctive repeating features, and face-like details). The
particles of dust in ordinary are actually a thousand times too small
to produce the larger orbs that show up in photos. Leonora Piper,
Daniel Dunglas Home and Gladys Osborne Leonard were mediums who
produced astonishing psychic results that investigators were unable
to explain. Many think the human body plan is stored in DNA, but (as discussed here) DNA
seems to use no language capable of expressing any such plan, and
instead uses a bare-bones language capable of storing only lists of
chemicals. That leaves the location of the human body plan as
something science does not actually understand.

For more information about these enigmas, follow the links above, or see my 4-part series "50 Things Science Cannot Explain," by using this link and scrolling down.

Below is a single image listing the table above (which I had to break up into two images for it to display properly).

Postscript: Below are some additional things science cannot explain.

The protein folding problem. Proteins are specified in DNA as only one-dimensional sequences of amino acids, but somehow they form into complicated three-dimensional structures. Scientists have spent 50 years trying to solve the riddle of why this happens, but have still not explained why this happens. See here for more about this fascinating problem.

Homochirality. Our cells use
only left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. Were it not for
that fact, it wouldn't be possible to make complex proteins. It would
be like trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle when half of the pieces were
turned upside-down; in that case there would be no way to fit the
pieces together. But when amino acids are created in the laboratory,
half are left-handed and half are right-handed; and so it is for
sugars. You would have to have seemingly impossible lucky breaks
needed for all amino acids to have the same left-handedness, with the
sugars all being right-handed.

The C-Value Paradox.It is not at all true that the more complex an organism, the more base pairs in its genome. Amphibians and flowering plants have more base pairs in their genomes than mammals (including man), and humans have only slightly more base pairs in their genomes than worms.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

The book What Is Life?
How Chemistry Becomes Biology by chemistry professor Addy Pross
is an example of the type of reductionism you get when an expert in a
particular topic tries to reduce something incredibly complicated to
the much simpler topic that the expert is familiar with. So an
economist may write a book claiming that human history is just
economics, and a hormone expert may claim that human behavior is just
the effect of hormones, and an information technology expert may
claim that human consciousness is just data processing. Pross's
variation on this type of errant reductionism involves an attempt to argue that
life is just chemistry. One of his chapters is entitled “Biology
Is Chemistry.”

But how can we explain the
explosion of information that occurred when life first originated?
Pross attempts to discuss this in a section entitled “Information
and Its Chemical Roots.” But his discussion is vacuous. First he says (without justification) that “the
biological phenomenon of information generation is nothing other than
the chemical phenomenon of establishing and enhancing specific
catalytic function.” Then he says, “Just as my writing of this
book creates information (hopefully), the process of evolution can
also create information.” That hardly makes a natural origin of
biological information understandable, since an author's writing a
book is a deliberate act by a conscious agent, which is not what
would be occurring in any natural scenario of the origin of
biological information.

Part of the problem of
explaining the origin of life is explaining the origin of the genetic
code, the complex system of symbolic representations used by life
from the beginning. It's hard to imagine any chemical reactions that
would have caused that to originate. What does Pross have to say
about the genetic code's origin? Nothing. The genetic code does not
appear in the index of his book. And what about cells? Of course,
explaining the origin of cells is one of the most troubling aspects
of explaining the origin of life. But Pross apparently has nothing
much to say about that, for I don't found an entry for “cell” or
“cells” in his index. And what about explaining the origin of
proteins, another gigantic problem in explaining the origin of life?
The only index entry for proteins in the index of Pross's book is an
entry marked “protein degradation.” Clearly, someone
paying little attention either to the origin of cells or the origin of
the genetic code or the origin of proteins is not someone who can justifiably use the phrase “How Chemistry Becomes Biology” as
the subtitle of his book.

The complex structure of a protein molecule

I do find a passing
reference to the origin of cells on page 186 of Pross's book, where
he says this:

That's when cells, as
discrete biological entities, were born. That transition was a highly
significant one – one might consider it as a phase transition.

A phase transition is a
physics concept. It is what occur when all the particles in a system
start behaving in a different way when a certain condition is
reached, such as when all the water particles in a liquid start
behaving differently when the water freezes. But a phase transition
does not involve an appearance of new information or new
functionality, so it is worthless in explaining the origin of the
complicated biochemical machinery in cells. The origin of cells was
not a phase transition.

On page 164 Pross gives a
reductionist definition of life, defining it as: “A
self-sustaining kinetically stable dynamic reaction network derived
from the replication reaction.” Which
is a definition of life that only a chemist would give. Do chemists
greet visitors by saying, “Greetings, fellow reaction network”?

After reading Pross's
book, I'm reminded of the old story about the blind men who were
presented with an elephant. One blind man held on to the leg of the
elephant and said the elephant is like a tree. Another blind man held
on to the tail of the elephant, and said that the elephant was like a
rope. Another blind man held on to the tusk of the elephant, and said
the elephant was like a spear. Like a blind man holding the tail of
an elephant and concluding that the elephant is just a rope, Pross
has got hold one of one part of life – chemistry-- and
apparently convinced himself that's all there is to life.

But biology cannot be
reduced to chemistry, just as chemistry cannot be reduced to physics.
Imagine it is early in the history of the universe, before water
formed, and you are some mysterious entity studying the universe. You
know all about physics and all about the different elements, but you
have never seen water. Could you predict from studying the properties
of hydrogen and the properties of oxygen that when these two are combined into a
molecule you would have something that would have the
properties of being wet and drippy? You certainly could not.
Chemistry is something that cannot be reduced to physics.

Similarly, biology cannot
be reduced to chemistry. Imagine if you were some pure-energy visitor
from some other universe who knew nothing about biological life.
Imagine you came to the early earth, and studied all the available
elements and chemicals, and all the chemical reactions that were
occurring, before life appeared. You would have no basis for predicting that any
macroscopic biological life would appear. Biological life is not merely chemistry. If you have a dead corpse, you cannot jolt it with some
electricity to restart the chemical reactions, and then have a
reanimated human that is alive (contrary to the hopes of Victor
Frankenstein).

Copyright Notice

All posts on this blog are authored by Mark Mahin, and are protected by copyright. Copyright 2013-2014 by Mark Mahin. All rights reserved. Any resemblance between any fictional character and any real person is purely coincidental.